About seven years ago I began to dictate the first of these Plays
to Lady Gregory. My eyesight had become so bad that I feared I
could henceforth write nothing with my own hands but verses, which,
as Theophile Gautier has said, can be written with a burnt match.
Our Irish Dramatic movement was just passing out of the hands of
English Actors, hired because we knew of no Irish ones, and our
little troop of Irish amateurs, as they were at the time, could not
have too many Plays, for they would come to nothing without
continued playing. Besides, it was exciting to discover, after the
unpopularity of blank verse, what one could do with three Plays
written in prose and founded on three public interests deliberately
chosen, religion, humour, patriotism. I planned in those days to
establish a dramatic movement upon the popular passions, as the
ritual of religion is established in the emotions that surround
birth and death and marriage, and it was only the coming of the
unclassifiable, uncontrollable, capricious, uncompromising genius
of J. M. Synge that altered the direction of the movement and made
it individual, critical, and combative. If his had not, some other
stone would have blocked up the old way, for the public mind of
Ireland, stupefied by prolonged intolerant organisation, can take
but brief pleasure in the caprice that is in all art, whatever its
subject, and, more commonly, can but hate unaccustomed personal
reverie.
General
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